Hacker News Reader

Comment by ShinyLeftPad | Hacker News Reader

It says "at least"... on many channels there's videos with just a few views and videos with tons of views with much more than 10x difference

View on HN

That's fair, Google admitted in the DoJ trial where it was convicted of being a monopolist that the revenues that it paid out were roughly 10% of the revenues it collected. If you have fewer than a requisite number of subscribers they keep 100% of the monetization proceeds. I was simply struck by the parallels between the way YouTube has grown up and how the whole movie industry grew up.

Wow, how many subscribers does one need to have?

1000 subscribers, 4000 hours in the last 12 months, and you must have uploaded 3 videos I think in the last 3 months to be allowed to apply for monetization.

There is a different requirement if you only post shorts.

Also worth pointing out that they’ve demonetized people after meeting the old monetization requirements and then not meeting their new requirements. No grandfathering.

I shed a tear (and subscribe) when I encounter an incredibly useful video but they have “only” a few hundred subs.

Because Google is losing money for those videos, they're collecting 100% of the revenue and shouldering 100% of the costs and 100% of the net loss. Perhaps they should split the net loss 50-50 with those users, but then no one would use YouTube.

Goog’s monetization requirements make no sense: requiring regular posting of new videos costs them money. You have people posting crap just to keep their monetization active.

More subscribers to a channel doesn’t save Google money at all.

Requiring X hours of views encourages posting longer videos, which costs them more to store and process.

They just want more content. They don't care about quality - the algorithm does a good job of sifting through all the content to find the good quality content. The definition of good quality being something that generates more money and keeps more eyes fixed to the screen!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com